Californium: A game about the many (sur)realities of Philip K. Dick

Play as Elvin Green, a writer whose life is falling apart in this phildickian tale.

Reality is mutable, vulnerable to interpretation and interference. It’s an idea that permeates through Philip K. Dick’s writing, one of the most influential forces in pop culture. Even if you don’t recognise his work by name, chances are you’ve experienced its impact. Minority Report, Blade Runner,A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall—these are all films that owe life to the acclaimed science fiction author. Similarly, an armament of video games draw substance from the man’s fiction, whether it’s Deus Ex or the upcoming Californium.

A collaborative effort between production companies Darjeeling and Nova Productions, Californium follows the life of a writer named Elvin Green, who finds reality unravelling even as his world crumbles around his ears. While far from a direct adaptation, the game is evocative of Dick’s gorgeously bizarre VALIS, which mulls over the possibility that human destiny might be subject to external control.

What makes this particularly interesting is that VALIS wasn’t entirely a work of fiction. In many ways, it was autobiographical. Like the narrator Horselover Fat, Dick believed in the idea that pink laser beams were being used by an extraterrestrial source to convey important revelations, such as the knowledge of an undetected birth defect in his son.

This surreal theory was only one of many that were precipitated by a chance encounter in 1974. After contacting the local pharmacy for pain medication, Dick met a girl donning an ichthys symbol. He asked about its origins and was immediately overcome by a moment of anamnesis, which revealed to him an image of “hateful Rome” and the knowledge of Jesus’ inevitable return.

Such strange, phantasmagoric visions would follow the author until his death. So overwhelming were these experiences that they catalysed an obsession. In the years following that first encounter, Dick wrote over 8,000 pages dissecting and describing his epiphanies. (Extracts would eventually be compiled into the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a ponderous read that has fascinated armchair academics since publication.)

In-game screenshots of Californium

Concept art

It should be noted that Californium only borrows from these ideas, distilling the author’s convoluted hypotheses into something approachable. Interestingly, it takes from his writing as well. Though adaptations of his work have embedded impressions of chrome and dystopian beauty in our minds, Dick’s actual prose was often unwieldy, featuring outrageous descriptions and an occasional silliness that belied the gravitas of his concepts. Californium manifests this dissonance in a smear of trippy, acid-kissed colours. Its world is bold, striking, a far cry from the grim monochrome often associated with Dick’s name.

“When you read Philip K. Dick, you realise the dystopia is not in the aesthetic, but its portrayal of human beings. His books were very fun and we wanted to keep this aesthetic," Darjeeling digital producer Noam Roubah told Ars.

To accomplish this, they sought out a French illustrator named Olivier Bonhomme, whose art teems with vivid colours and psychedelic imagery. The team also actively wanted to move away from what Roubah describes as the “classic, rainy, dark, Philip K. Dick” style and return to what the author put into his novels which, coincidentally, was very much coloured by his history with recreational chemicals.

The idea for Californium itself came about in 2011 when the creators were pondering what to create for the 30th anniversary of Philip K. Dick’s death. “It’s really interesting to work on this man, this writer,” said Roubah. “Everything he wrote in the ‘50s and the ‘60s is now part of our modern world. The dehumanisation of human behaviour, the internet—these were all in his books.

“Initially, we thought about doing something on the web since Philip K. Dick talked a lot about virtual worlds and what it means to be human. The Internet seemed like the perfect place to explore that.”

In-game footage of Californium.

But eventually, after weeks and months of discussion, the team decided that they would make a video game. From there, they then took elements from Philip K. Dick’s life and work to create an entirely new narrative. The result is something deeply reminiscent of the author’s early years. There is a wife who walks out on Green, and a dismissive editor, drawing upon Dick’s struggles to be recognised by the mainstream literary community.

Then, of course, there’s the reality shift.

It might sound like a daunting premise, but Roubah tells me that anyone can traverse Californium’s melange of worlds with ease. “You just have to walk around, talk to people, look around, and search for things that are not normal. At some point, maybe, you might see glasses on the table only to have it change into a book. When you find abnormal things like that, you will expose another reality.”

A simple conceit, but also one rooted in Dick’s philosophies. In an essay entitled "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others," he expounds on the possibility of alternate presents that are continuously taking place, all without being noticed save by the subconscious.

Further Reading

“We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was—always had been—in another place entirely,” Dick wrote. “Such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed—reprogrammed, as it were—and that, because of this, an alternate world branched off, became actualised instead of the prior one, and that in fact, in literal fact, we are once more living this particular segment of linear time.”

In light of that, it’s no surprise that Roubah is toying with the idea of doing something with virtual reality, something that shares Californium's gameplay but not its length. He’s not sure about what form it’d take yet. They’re still prototyping, but it would appear as though Roubah is no rush. With funding from French broadcaster Arte, the studios have no obligation to commercialise Californium. It can be art, however esoteric or phildickian that might be.

Californium will be released in early 2016 on Steam.

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